UCL/British Psychological Society History of the Psychological Disciplines Seminar Series

Monday 29 February 2016

Matei Iagher (UCL)

Psychology and the quest for a science of religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a new intellectual discipline emerged in academic departments in the United States and Western Europe: the psychology of religion. Championed by figures like William James, Théodore Flournoy, Pierre Janet, and later C.G. Jung, the psychology of religion claimed to offer a novel science of religion, based on an equally new revalorization of individual religious experience. The psychology of religion drew on the affective definition of religion propounded by Friedrich Schleiermacher in the earlier part of the nineteenth century and placed itself in continuity (and sometimes in opposition) with projects to found a science of religion, which were drawn up by scholars like Max Müller or C. P. Tiele in the Victorian period. This paper will offer a brief overview of some of the key points of the psychology of religion, as it was practiced in the United States, France and Switzerland, and will place the movement within the context of wider debates about the nature and function of the science(s) of religion(s) at the turn of the century.

Monday7 March 2016

Dr. David Lederer (Maynooth University, Ireland/Queen Mary University of London)

In 1923, Freud published an illustrated tract entitled ‘A Demonological Neurosis in the 17th Century’, in which he applied the tools of psychoanalysis to the autobiography of the Bavarian painter, Johann Christoph Haizmann. Freud’s analysis arose from a request by the Director of the Fideikomiss Library in Vienna to provide an expert opinion on the matter. Through a method known as ‘retrospective medicine’, Freud explained the painter’s possession as a consequence of his relationship to his father – a diagnosis not dissimilar to his more famous account of Daniel Schreber. However, the influence of demonology upon his nascent profession ran far deeper than this chance encounter with one historic case, revealing certain continuities which consequently call the value of retrospective medicine into question and raise interesting questions about the historical development of the modern psychiatric profession.

From the Torrington Place entrance to UCL, enter the campus on Malet Place. After fifty metres, you will find Foser court on the right hand side. Turn right under the underpass, and enter via the second door on the right. The common room is straight ahead.

What started in the early 1950s as a small informal peer-group of GPs, based in the Tavistock Clinic, became by the 1960s one of the most influential medical movements of the postwar era: the Balint movement. Named after the British-Hungarian psychoanalyst, Michael Balint, the theoretical assumption behind Balint Groups was that many doctors – and especially family doctors – do not know yet how to use one of the most important medical tools, namely, what Balint described as the ‘drug doctor.’. This was particularly true, he believed, in psychosomatic illnesses and medical cases with a clear psychosocial nature.

This paper will contextualize the emergence of the Balint movement within the heyday of welfarist ideology, where GPs were encouraged to take a parental role in running the emotional economy of domestic lives in their communities. Thus, patients and doctors were invited to adopt a psychoanalytical language which focuses on internal feelings, emotions, and unconscious behavior of the individual. At the same time, however, a new kind of medical authority emerged – one which played a crucial role as a social and ethical guidance in the postwar British welfare society.

From the Torrington Place entrance to UCL, enter the campus on Malet Place. After fifty metres, you will find Foser court on the right hand side. Turn right under the underpass, and enter via the second door on the right. The common room is straight ahead.